AUSTIN — John O’Brien worked in the Tarrant County Jail library in 1997 and befriended a fellow inmate who asked for his advice. One day as they chatted about John Nolley’s legal woes, the pet store clerk and small-time pot dealer confessed to savagely stabbing to death Sharon McLane in her Bedford apartment.

That’s the story O’Brien told jurors at Nolley’s 1998 trial, anyway. He also assured them that prosecutors hadn’t promised him anything in exchange for his testimony and that he had never before snitched on a fellow inmate.

Almost none of O’Brien’s story was true, particularly the bit about Nolley’s confession. But the jurors didn’t know that, and they sentenced Nolley to life in prison for the crime. He spent 18 years in prison before investigators uncovered new evidence pointing to his innocence.

Nolley’s out of prison now, starting a new life and waiting for a final court ruling in his case. Meanwhile, lawmakers hope a new law they approved this year that took effect Sept. 1 will prevent others from experiencing the same kind of injustice.

House Bill 34 includes a number of measures intended to prevent wrongful convictions, including a requirement that prosecutors gather more information about jailhouse informants like O’Brien. The law, which requires prosecutors to track their use of jailhouse informants and provide more information to defense lawyers, is the strongest anti-snitch measure in the nation, criminal justice advocates say.

The bill represents the culmination of nearly a decade of legislative reforms meant to address problems that have led to the exoneration of more than 320 wrongfully convicted Texans since 1989.

“We are less likely to convict an innocent person now than we were 10 or 20 years ago,” said Gary Udashen, president of the Innocence Project of Texas. “These reforms in law have made a significant difference.”

John Nolley

In 2015, investigators in Tarrant County’s conviction integrity unit began digging through decades-old files in Nolley’s case after new DNA testing and fingerprint analysis produced no evidence that he was at the bloody 1996 crime scene.

They discovered the truth about O’Brien’s testimony.

He had been in the jail awaiting trial on theft charges that stemmed from a scheme he and several co-conspirators hatched to steal pickups and trailers full of welding and farm equipment. His long rap sheet included nine previous felonies and multiple probation revocations. He faced up to 99 years behind bars.

Despite his claims to the jury that he had never offered to snitch and had never testified in court before, the prosecutors’ files showed that for 18 months before Nolley’s trial, O’Brien had been desperately peddling his testimony to investigators. Just five months before Nolley’s trial, O’Brien had falsely testified in another murder case.

John Nolley (center, facing camera) was embraced by his brother LaMarcus Nolley and sister Mia Nolley after he was released from prison in 2016.

(Paul Moseley/The Associated Press )

Directly contradicting O'Brien's repeated insistence that he got nothing in return for his testimony, the documents showed that just two weeks after he told prosecutors of Nolley’s alleged confession, O’Brien landed a sweet plea deal and was sentenced to just 10 years' deferred adjudication.

None of that information made it to the jury or to Nolley’s lawyers.

The district court, in its finding that Nolley should be released, concluded that the suppression of that information undermined confidence in the jury’s verdict.

Nolley was released from prison in May 2016 and is awaiting a ruling from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on his request to be declared innocent. Since his release, Nolley has spent more time with his two sons, who were toddlers when he was sent to prison. He’s gotten married, has a full-time job and is expecting another child soon.

“He has taken amazing strides to rebuild his life,” said Nina Morrison, an attorney with the New York-based Innocence Project who worked on Nolley’s case.

O’Brien, in the meantime, allegedly continued his thieving. He, along with his brother and another man, were arrested in 2011 in connection with as many as 30 burglaries in Texas, Oklahoma and Florida.

Lessons learned

Dawn Boswell, chief of the Tarrant County criminal district attorney’s conviction integrity unit, said there was no process in place at the time of Nolley’s trial to alert prosecutors to jailhouse snitches who had testified in other cases. Because O’Brien’s deals were made with others in the prosecutor’s office, attorneys in Nolley’s case were unaware of the inmate’s tattling proclivity.

“How are people in the office going to know who is using jailhouse informants and when, if we’re not actually keeping track of that?” Boswell said.

About a month after Nolley’s release, Boswell said, the prosecutor’s office created a database that would allow attorneys to share data about informants they use. Prosecutors now document informants' criminal histories and any benefit they received in exchange for their testimony.

The Tarrant County policy became a blueprint for the Tim Cole Exoneration Review Commission, a panel of lawmakers and legal experts who were examining past wrongful convictions. Lawmakers created the committee in 2015 and charged its members with recommending new laws that could prevent such injustices.

Members of Tim Cole's family stood with his mother, Ruby Session (center) at his grave site at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Fort Worth after receiving pardon documents from Gov. Rick Perry in March 2010. (File Photo/The Associated Press)

The committee was the second panel since 2009 convened in the name of Cole, the first posthumously exonerated Texan. Cole, a 26-year-old student at Texas Tech University, was accused of rape in 1985 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He died of an asthma attack in 1999 before DNA evidence revealed that he was innocent.

The new committee’s recommendations — which lawmakers approved this year — included requiring the recording of interrogations in felony cases, updating standards for eyewitness identification, and asking the Texas Forensic Science Commission to study the use of drug field test kits, a practice that led to dozens of wrongful convictions in Harris County.

The most significant of the new committee’s recommendations was to limit the use of jailhouse informants. More than 30 percent of the non-drug-related cases the committee reviewed involved the testimony of a jailhouse informant.

"Regulating this group of witnesses is critically important to the fair administration of justice," said Rebecca Brown, policy director at the Innocence Project. "These are people who are incentivized to provide potentially unreliable information."

Under the new law, prosecutors will be required to document their use of jailhouse informants and share information with defense lawyers about inmates' criminal histories and anything they may have been offered in exchange for their testimony.

Nationally, jailhouse informants have contributed to about 20 percent of wrongful convictions that were discovered because of DNA testing, Brown said. But no other state, she said, has adopted an informant law as strong as the one Texas passed this year.

“We’re really seeing for the first time a real trend toward addressing this contributing cause to wrongful convictions in legislatures,” Brown said.

Rep. John Smithee, R-Amarillo, served as chairman of the Tim Cole Exoneration Review Commission.

(Deborah Cannon/The Associated Press)

Shannon Edmonds, staff attorney and director of governmental relations for the Texas Association of County and District Attorneys, said prosecutors rarely use jailhouse informants in cases that don’t involve crimes inside prisons. And he said it could be a challenge for prosecutors in small counties to implement the policy because lawmakers provided no funding to help counties create systems like the one Tarrant County has established.

“Individual prosecutors’ offices will have to build something from the ground up, and in most places it will probably be kept in filing cabinets or binders or something like that,” Edmonds said.

Allen Place, lobbyist for the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, said jailhouse informants can be effective witnesses at trial. It’s crucial, he said, that defense lawyers know informants' criminal backgrounds and what they’ve been offered for their testimony so that they can ensure that the jury can adequately assess a person’s credibility.

“It is attempting to prevent something that nobody wants,” Place said. “It certainly is a step in the right direction.”